“Lil Wayne,” Kit fires back immediately.
“The Broadway Across America cast ofJesus Christ Superstar,” Lilly tries.
“That lady astronaut who drove across the country in a diaper to confront her romantic rival,” June puts in.
“I think she died,” Mari says. “Didn’t she die?”
Their mother rolls her eyes. “Oh, you all are hilarious. No.” She pauses dramatically. “Joaquin Shannon.”
Olivia frowns, plucking a noodle delicately from her bowl with two fingers. “None of us know who that is.”
Cinta sighs impatiently. “The interior designer,” she informs them. “Come on, girls. He just did Jennifer Aniston’s art barn. If we’re going to be hosting guests like Charlie Bingley and his friends—”
“Do you imagine we’re going to be hosting guests like Charlie Bingley and his friends?” Lilly asks her, but before her mother can answer her dad puts down his fork.
“Cinta,” he says, “we talked about this. And we agreed that now was not the time to undertake another reno—”
“We didn’t agree on anything,” Lilly’s mom says crisply, then turns back to the rest of them. “Joaquin had some great ideas for blowing out the back of the kitchen—”
“Cinta—”
“—something really natural and organic—”
“Cinta—”
“—fully encased in glass—”
Lilly’s father slams two meaty hands on the table with a startling thump. “Damn it, Cinta. What part of being ninety days from foreclosure don’t you understand?”
All at once, the room gets very, very quiet. “Hang on,” Lillysays, trying to keep her voice level. “Ninety days from what, exactly?”
“It’s nothing,” her mother says quickly, waving a paper towel like a hanky. “A paperwork snafu, that’s all. Dominic, I already told you this isn’t something the girls need to be worrying about.”
“The girls are grown women, Cinta!” her father counters. “Look around, will you? They’re certainly old enough to understand this family’s extremely precarious financial situation. Who knows, maybe it’ll light a fire under them to contribute before all seven of us wind up living in the basement of my mother’s house back in Newark and selling zeppole out of a truck at the Saint Agrippina Festival!”
“We contribute,” Olivia protests, looking wounded.
“I know you do, sweetheart,” their father says. “But I am sorry to report the bank does not take loan repayment in the form of a lifetime supply of essential oils, no matter how compelling the health benefits might be.”
Lilly swallows hard. The development was brand-new when they moved in eleven years ago, freshly constructed luxury homes nestled into the hills on the outskirts of Calabasas. She remembers sliding down the empty hallways, socks slipping on the gleaming hardwood floors. She thought this place was a palace—the biggest, grandest, most beautiful house anyone had ever lived in, with a copse of citrus and avocado trees in the backyard and enough bedrooms for each of them to have their own. It started falling apart more or less as soon as they unpacked their boxes, the sinks leaking and the doors coming off their hinges and the dining room chandelier crashing down into the cake at Marianne’s fourteenth birthday party. Now, more than a decade later, it bears the scars of at least a dozen half-baked renovations her mother has undertaken and thenlost interest in partway through, including a nonfunctional sensory deprivation chamber in the primary bathroom and a custom fresco in the entryway that looks for all the world like it belongs on the ceiling of the Cheesecake Factory at the Paramus Park mall.
Still, Lilly thinks, looking around at her sisters’ lovely, stricken faces: it’s their house.
“Well!” she says, clapping her hands together with practiced eldest-daughter authority, even though she’s technically second in line. “Lucky for you all, I know an opportunity when I see one. Clearly the only option is to kidnap Charlie Bingley and hold him for ransom in the pool house until the producers ofMajor Fantasticroll over and agree to pay off the rest of the mortgage in exchange for his safe return.”
“Or,” her father counters pointedly, “you could all go out and look for jobs.”
The five Benedetto sisters consider that for a moment: heads tilted in quiet contemplation, fingertips tapping their pink, glossy mouths. “Kidnapping,” they decide unanimously, the clatter of their raucous laughter filling the dining room and drifting out the windows into the hot, breezeless yard.
***
After dinner Lilly takes her laptop out onto the second-floor terrace and props her feet up on the railing, the fan whirring softly like the purr of a well-behaved cat. Lilly’s been writing her whole life, little plays for her sisters to put on and the overwrought short stories she used to post to her long-defunct LiveJournal. She actually got accepted into the creative writing program at USC back before the show got picked up, though she deferred at Cinta’s urging—“College isn’t going anywhere, is it? Your youth, on theother hand...”—and never actually enrolled. She thinks about what it might have been like sometimes, the workshops and the lectures, studying in the library late at night. She would have been bored, probably, would have missed the clubs and the parties and the vacations at Isobel’s father’s resorts.
Then again: maybe not.
Lilly tilts her head back, remembering a trip they took to the Maldives right after they wrapped the show’s second season—the sea glittering endlessly down below them, the sky extravagantly, wastefully blue. She and Joe were newly engaged that winter, the diamond huge and heavy on the fourth finger of her left hand: Lilly remembers pulling it off to admire the tiny tan line underneath it, the mark it had already left on her body feeling almost more significant than the ring itself.
He found her on the uppermost deck their second night out on the water: “There you are,” he said, sliding one familiar hand around her waist and pulling her back against him, his heart tapping hard and thready against her spine. Lilly glanced over her shoulder, frowning a little. It was still mostly party drugs at that point—at least, she was pretty sure it was still mostly party drugs—but his mother polished the pews at church on Saturday mornings. He wasn’t built for the DesRoche family yacht.
